The Best Games of 2005

The following is a take on the games that were released in 2005 by several of our staff members. Each page represents a different staff member’s viewpoint and at the end you’ll find the results of our Game of the Year voting which is broken down into many categories. Without further ado we’ll begin with Mark van Steen's article: 

I want to start off by applauding the publishers and developers of our favorite PC games for bringing us some innovative, interesting, excellent games this year.  Looking back, there’s a rather long list of people and games in particular I’d like to point your attention to once more before jumping head first into 2006.  *takes deep breath*  ATARI and Quantic Dream’s Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy showed more next-generation gaming than many next-generation games themselves will.  Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones mark excellent endings to their little trilogies; Gearbox’s Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Earned in Blood gave the World War II FPS genre (owned by Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2) some fresh competition; Introversion’s Darwinia and Mark Healy’s Rag Doll Kung Fu showed that online delivery is a good thing for both gamers and (indie) developers. Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Valve’s Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast and Monolith’s F.E.A.R. crushed hardware with their great graphics and ditto game play; Arena Net’s Guild Wars and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft are massive successes living side by side.  Electronic Arts had some nice titles with Need for Speed: Most Wanted and DICE’s Battlefield 2, and to top it off Lucas Arts’ Star Wars: Republic Commando and Ubisoft’s King Kong both turned out to be decent games – who’d have thought we’d ever get to see a game based on a movie license that’s actually good, let alone two in one year, let alone one of which developed internally by Lucas Arts itself?  Yes, without a doubt, it’s been a good year.

When looking back like that, we gamers don’t just applaud the best of the best, we also award it. Namely, we do this with the Game of the Year awards, an annual tradition that’s just too much fun to ever let slide by without expressing our own opinions at every single chance we get.  In previous years, I personally would have a pretty clear choice for the biggest of them all, the Game of the Year Award.  From Max Payne to Grand Theft Auto 3 to Call of Duty and last year’s Half-Life 2, my favorite games left almost all the competition biting dust every single year.  At times, there were even multiple games in a single year competing fiercely for the award.  In a rather interesting turn of events, despite the list of games named in the first paragraph, I find myself without even one such title this year….

Usually I’m a pretty opinionated gamer, a seasoned veteran of action games who knows a good game when he sees one.  Be it in forum posts or full-on reviews, if I play a game I will have my say on it.  As such, while I’ve scorned a lot of this year’s filth as such, I have also praised quite a few games.  But where one or two always leapt out from the rest of the bunch during previous years, this year no one game manages to do the same.

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood are both great. Call of Duty 2, short as it may be, was a fantastic experience. F.E.A.R. and Fahrenheit are awesome. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is yet another superb game in a longstanding franchise. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, Prince of Persia: the Two Thrones, Advent Rising and even Quake 4 were all games I greatly enjoyed.  But now that the Game of the Year awards have come around, now that I want to laud one game in particular for being the best one, I’m stumped!  All these games are excellent; all these games have their flaws.  It’s both a huge compliment to the high quality of PC gaming as it is an insult to each game when I find no single game truly deserving of a Game of the Year award.

I gave the issue a few days’ thought, and ended up looking back at earlier Games of the Year (that is to say, games I’d have given the award in previous years).  They’re all action games.  Some with epic scale.  Some with a kick ass storyline.  Some with innovation, some with super graphics.  Yet only one thing, I notice, do all these games have in common: they raise the bar.  Or actually, they take the bar that was set, chew it up, spit it out and put up a new one some five or six meters higher.  Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Halo: Combat Evolved, Call of Duty, Quake Arena, Outcast, Grand Theft Auto 3, Battlefield 1942, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, Max Payne….  All these games are far and away much better than the games like them at the time. And when I put that next to this year’s line-up, that’s when I find out what my problem is.

Is F.E.A.R. better than Half-Life 2?  Not really, if you ask me.  Is Call of Duty 2 so much better than the first?  Nope. Did Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood make me forget their predecessors even existed?  No.  The standards set in their genres were met, and some games raised the bar ever so slightly, but the gap is not that big.  It’s as if the games I play have hit some kind of limit, as if there were a bigger thing that kept them from rocking even more.  Perhaps, it’s that 2004 was such a tough year to top.  Perhaps, it’s the fact we’re at the end of this generation.  Perhaps, it’s me expecting too much. Perhaps, it’s…. Hell, whatever it is, it’s given a good year but I wanted more.  I want a game that just grabs me by the throat and demands that GotY award.  I want a game that would pry the award from my cold, dead fingers if it had to.  But the seasoned veteran of action games in me stands firm, stands tall and keeps every single game at bay with destructive criticism.  Whether the games were too short, too repetitive, too much like their fellow games, too heavy on hardware or just too plain dull, there wasn’t a single game that does what I want it to do before it can have that award.

So, the best game of the year? Twist my arm, and eventually I might yell F.E.A.R.  Don’t, and I’ll give you a blank stare and get back to you next year.

Twonha’s choice

Impossible as it may have been to come up with a definite Game of the Year, I do have a long list of Best and Worsts of 2005 I’d like to share with you.  As usual, it’s all my own, personal opinion so don’t shoot me if you don’t agree!